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Monday, April 25, 2011

Making of "Master & Servant"

Planning and composing

In my first attempt thumbnail I tried to create a messy environment full of electronic parts. At first sight, it was what my father's repair shop seemed. He had a lot of supplementary pieces and replacement parts of almost every electronic in 80s and sometimes created toys and gadgets to me and my brothers have fun with. He had a lot of books and magazines that helps him in his self-taught journey and always used stripboard papers to guide his repair work.

I searched for a lot of reference images that could help me to fill the basement with things that represent electronics parts and devices.

During the planning, I changed my mind about how to tell the story. At the beginning the father appeared in foreground, but I though that it could spoil the narrative. So I putted the kid in foreground to emphasize the idea that he broken something and was concern about the reaction of his father. I think that the indirect eye contact lead our attention to the father countenance.

Until this moment I was satisfied about the composition, I thought that was time to improve the perspective and get a more accurate line art. I worked with a three-point perspective.

Lighting

The lighting was for me one of more pleasant things to do in this piece. I really enjoy play with it. The first thing that I did was to find the main spot beam light into the perspective space. Then I began to paint the indirect environment light and the spot beam distorted over the kid. A little detail that I tried to give some highlight was the table light on the desk simulating a subsurface scattering on the father skin.

The little accident

Create the little accident sequence was interesting because involved some personal clumsy experience. I didn't wanted to create nothing serious, just disastrous enough to be a little funny. To get that, I added small sparks and a bit of smoke and dirt around the little tv that. When I reached this point, I was a little more satisfied with the story, so I felt myself more secure to go deep into the father details.

Afterwards, when I finished the floor texture, I look to the composition and felt that the kid was a bit big. My original idea was mix two styles, the father a little more realistic and the son more cartoony, but I thought that the kid could be just a little smaller to balance the look and feel.

Filling the environment

In this stage, I felt that would time to filling the shelves and messing around with electronics things. I took a couple of days to begin that, I was feeling too lazy to begin filling the environment with a lot of things (lol). When I beat my laziness, I realized that was pretty funny to do this details. I remembered how my father arranged his things, was nice. :)

Final image

Working in this illustration was a very unique experience to me. I spent a lot of time on it and enjoyed too much to working on all details that I was capable of handling. Today I am very proud of the final result, even knowing that I could improve a lot of things.